by P. D. James
Black Shirl said: “Went to a posh school then, did you?”
“I ran away from that too.”
“Got a place have you? You and your ma?”
“Oh yes, just a room. But we won’t be stopping there long. My boyfriend is buying a flat for us.”
“What’s his name, your boyfriend?”
“Ernest. Ernest Hemingway.”
The name was received in a disparaging silence. Marlene said: “You wouldn’t get me going out with a feller called Ernest. My granddad was Ernest.”
“What’s he like?” asked Black Shirl.
“The outdoor type really. He shoots and hunts a lot. And he likes bulls. Actually, he’s getting rather a bore.”
She enjoyed fabricating the lies and soon learned that they were infinitely credulous. Either nothing was too egregious to be unbelievable, or they didn’t greatly care. Their own lives were made tolerable by fantasy; they had none of the pettiness which would grudge it to others. What did worry them, as it obviously did Sid, was the fact that she and her mother had presented their National Insurance cards for stamping. All the girls working in the chippie were drawing unemployment benefit. They felt vaguely threatened by this orthodoxy. Philippa found it necessary to explain: “It’s my probation officer. He knows I’m working. I can’t put anything across on him.”
They looked at her pityingly. Probation officers were admittedly less gullible than local authority social workers, but this unreasonable docility lowered her in their eyes. Not by such naivety did one survive in the urban jungle. Often she smiled to herself, remembering that Gabriel believed, or claimed to believe, that the weak, the sick and the ignorant preyed on the strong, the healthy and the intelligent. He could have found evidence enough at Sid’s Plaice. But Philippa, bent over the sink, her back aching, her skin sodden with steam, told herself that Gabriel’s world could well survive the pathetic depredations of Marlene, Debbie and Black Shirl.
Two vivid and contrasting mental pictures came frequently into her mind: Gabriel calling for her one bright Saturday morning in the summer term, swinging himself out of his Lagonda, running up the steps of number 68, his cashmere sweater slung from his shoulders; Black Shirl humping to a corner of the kitchen the great bag of washing for her five children which she would wheel in a pram to the launderette on her way home. Perhaps Maurice’s mind was patterned with equally vivid images, contrasts which had made him a Socialist and which, even now, kept him one, despite the knowledge, which surely he shared, that his creed would merely transfer the Lagonda to an owner equally, if differently, privileged and that there was no economic system in this world which would transfer the Lagonda to Shirl, and the washing and the five children to Gabriel.
Once, when walking to the late-night bus, her mother asked: “You don’t think we exploit them?”
“How? Considering we get through twice the washing-up at our sink that they do at theirs, you could argue that they exploit us.”
“I suppose I mean that we pretend to be friendly, to be one of them, but back home we talk and laugh about them as if they’re objects, interesting specimens.”
“But they are interesting specimens, more amusing and interesting than any we’d meet in the typical office. If they don’t know how we talk about them does it matter?”
“Perhaps not to them. It might to us.”
After a few seconds’ silence, she said: “Are you going to write about them?”
“That hadn’t occurred to me. That isn’t why we took the job. I suppose I’ll file them in the subconscious until I need them.”
She half expected her mother to ask, “Will you file me there too?” But she said nothing, and for a little time they walked together in silence.
In the bus, her mother asked: “How long do you suppose we ought to stay at Sid’s?”
“As long as we’re happy to live on fish and chips. I admit I sometimes wonder if they’ve any vacancies for washers-up at L’Ecu de France.”
“Is that where you used to eat?”
“Only on special occasions. That and the Gay Hussar and Mon Plaisir are Maurice’s favourites. Bertorelli’s was for every day. I used to meet him there for lunch sometimes. I love Bertorelli’s.”
She wondered whether Maurice still ate there, and if Signor Bertorelli ever asked for her in that other world. Her mother said tentatively: “We could stay for another week or so, perhaps, if you’re not too tired or bored. I don’t mind the fish. I rather like it.”
“I’m not in the least bored. And we can change jobs as soon as we are. We’ve got our cards nicely stamped up, and I suppose Sid would give us a reference if we twisted his arm. He doesn’t give many bills, have you noticed? Two-thirds of his business is on a cash, no-tax basis. I dare say we’d only have to whisper that and he’d happily give us a year’s pay in lieu of notice.”
“I don’t think we ought to do that. He’s been decent to us.”
“Anyway, we’re free to go when we like. That’s the fun of it. Just let me know when you’re tired of fish.”
10
Their freedom did, indeed, seem to be limitless, stretching out in concentric waves from those three small rooms above Monty’s Fruit and Veg to embrace the whole of London. The freedom of the city, of the lumpy grass under the elms of St. James’s Park where they would search for a spare length of grass among the knapsacks of the prone tourists, and lie on their backs, staring up through a dazzle of shivering green and silver and listening to the midday band concert. There would be a circle of deck chairs round the bandstand and here the regulars would sit having taken their seats early: large ladies from the suburbs and the provinces with their sandwiches, their summer hats, their plump, ringed fingers guarding bulging handbags on comfortable laps. When the drizzle began they would rummage in their bags and spread mackintoshes over their knees, unfold a concertina of thin plastic to cover their hats. Having paid their money for a deck chair, the vagaries of an English summer couldn’t cheat them of their forty minutes of crashing brass, the red-braided uniforms, the conductor’s brisk salute.
But for Philippa and her mother, despite these almost daily excursions, the core of their joint life lay in Delaney Street and Mell Street. Philippa told herself that she couldn’t have found a better part of London in which to be anonymous. The district had a life of its own, but it was one in which the sense of community was fostered by seeing the same familiar faces, not by inquiring into their business. Delaney Street was a quiet cul-de-sac inhabited chiefly by the middle-aged or elderly living above their small family shops. It had something of the atmosphere of a self-sufficient, ancient and sleepy village, a sluggish backwater between the great surging rivers of the Marylebone Road and the Edgware Road. Many of its occupants, like Mr. and Mrs. Tookes at the junk shop, and the two eccentric Miss Peggs who spent their time perambulating in Mell Street, leading a string of small discouraged dogs, had been born in the street as had their parents before them. They formed a select and secretive coterie, much given to standing in each other’s doorways, apparently wordlessly communicating, seeming to huddle themselves against the cold even on the warmest day, and viewing with dispassionate, amused or ironic eyes the casual visitors or newcomers like natives viewing the arrival of yet another wave of credulous and soon to be disillusioned settlers. Their chief preoccupation was the rumour and threat of a local authority development which would sweep their world away. They stared across at the corrugated fence of the wasteland with hard but troubled eyes. Philippa, always curious, got to know a little about them by casually discreet questions to George. She might have learned more had she and her mother drunk in the Blind Beggar, but they thought it prudent to keep apart; one could not patronize the local pub for long and remain private. But they felt accepted in the street. Their neighbours were always polite and sometimes friendly. They watched, occasionally they smiled, but they asked no questions.
Saturday was market day in Mell Street. By nine o’clock the police van had arrived, t
he barriers had been dragged out and were in place and the street was closed to through traffic. It was a small, intimate, bustling market, cosmopolitan but at the same time very English. The bargaining was carried out with humour and good nature, and occasionally in the old money. Early in the morning the seller of second-hand rugs and carpets wheeled up his great wooden barrow and patterned the road with his wares. Unregarding and unrebuked, the shoppers walked over them. The tarmac itself became festive. Later the market took on something of the atmosphere of an eastern souk when the brass-seller arrived to set out his jangling pots, and a Pakistani who sold cheap jewellery hung across his stall a swinging curtain of wooden beads. On the material stall lengths of brightly patterned cloth were spun from the great bales; the vendors of fruit and vegetables, fish and plants, meat and kitchenware bawled out their wares; the air was sickly with the smell from the hot-dog stall; and at a corner of the street a thin gentle-faced boy wearing a button, “Jesus loves me,” patiently held out his pamphlets to the unregarding crowd. Cats looped among the wooden trestles and stretched themselves in a rigid similitude of death on the woollen jumpers which spilled from the second-hand clothes stall while, outside the shops, the bright-eyed dogs quivered with excitement or crouched gently groaning, their eyes half closed against the sun. Philippa and her mother rummaged among the clothes stalls for hand-knitted woollens, some of them too worn to be used. Her mother would later unpick, then skein and wash the wool. There seemed always to be crinkled loops of wool drooping across the bath to dry. The boxes of odds and ends placed at the sides of the stalls yielded their treasures, including a tea cloth of hand-embroidered linen which they mended, washed and starched and used ceremoniously for Saturday afternoon tea.
Behind the stalls were the small shops; the old-fashioned draper where one could still buy woollen combinations and sleeved vests, and where the pink lace-up corsets hung in the window, their strings dangling; the Greek delicatessen smelling of syrup and sharp Mediterranean wine; the small general store, clean, sweet-smelling, perpetually dark, with a bell on the door where old Mrs. Davies shuffled in from the shadows to serve them with milk, butter and tea; the larger of the half-dozen junk shops whose cluttered interior they would penetrate through to a back yard piled with old furniture and fitted along one wall with racks where a miscellany of crockery, pans and pictures offered the chance of a find. Here it was they uncovered two uncracked cups, one early Worcester, one Staffordshire, with chipped but matching saucers, and an agreeably shaped grime-covered dish which, after washing, was revealed as blue and white seventeenth-century Swansea pottery. It was like playing at housekeeping; the re-enactment of the innocent childhood games which neither of them had known.
Philippa had still learned almost nothing of her mother’s past. From time to time they would talk briefly about her mother’s life in prison, but nothing about the crime and nothing about their earliest and shared years. Philippa asked no questions. She told herself that L. P. Hartley was right; the past was another country and they could choose whether to visit there. Her mother didn’t choose and she had no right to compel her, vulnerable as she was to travel that stony road. She had been given the account of the murder; she told herself that, for the present, it must be enough. She couldn’t use her possession of the flat, her companionship, her defence against the noisy intrusions of this new world to purchase a confidence which wasn’t freely offered. There was no commitment and that meant no commitment on either side. But she found that she was visualizing less and less a future in which they would be completely apart. She had virtually compelled her mother to share a flat with her because she needed to discover her own identity. She was discovering it, and in ways which she had neither expected nor planned. Discovering her mother’s identity was another matter and it could wait. There was no hurry to explore the past; experiencing the present was interesting enough, and they had, after all, their whole lives before them.
11
After ten days her mother’s probation officer came to the flat. Philippa knew that the visit was inevitable, a condition of her mother’s licence, yet she prepared herself to dislike him. He had written to say when he would arrive, and she arranged to take their sheets to the launderette, ostensibly so that her mother and he could talk in private, but really in the hope of avoiding an introduction. But when she returned and put the key in the lock she could hear her mother’s voice, clear, ordinary, even animated. He was in the kitchen, drinking tea from a mug. She found herself shaking hands with a mild-eyed, stocky young man with a russet, tangled beard and balding head. He wore blue jeans and a fawn sweatshirt. His sandalled feet were brown and surprisingly clean. Everything about him was clean. Some of Maurice’s colleagues dressed with just such informality, but with them it was an ostentation, a desire to demonstrate their solidarity with their students. She felt that this man dressed to suit himself. Her mother introduced him but her mind blocked the words from her consciousness. She wanted none of him, not even his name.
He had brought with him an African violet which he had grown himself from a cutting. Watching him help her mother to pot it, she knew that she resented him, resented her mother’s docile acceptance of this mild but degrading surveillance, resented his intrusion on their privacy. And she knew herself to be jealous. She was looking after her mother. They were looking after each other. They didn’t need the bureaucratic, carefully rationed caring of the State. Later during the visit, when he and her mother had been discussing the pots of herbs growing on the kitchen window, and her mother had gone to find a pencil and paper to write down some of the names, she said: “Don’t you think that after ten years society could leave my mother alone? She isn’t a danger to anyone; you must know that.”
He said gently: “Licence has to be the same for everyone. The law can’t make fish of one and fowl of the other.”
“But what good do you hope to do? Not to my mother; I know the answer there. What good do you do for your more ordinary clients? You do call them clients, don’t you? I mean, you are a kind of emotional bank manager.”
He ignored the last question and answered the first.
“Not much. It’s more a question of not doing them harm, trying to help them not to do themselves harm.”
“But what exactly do you do?”
“The Statute says, ‘advise, assist and befriend.’ ”
“But you can’t befriend someone by Act of Parliament. How could anyone, even the most deprived, be satisfied with or deceived by that kind of friendship, a spurious second-best?”
“Second-best is all that most people ever have. People manage with very little; friendship as well as money. I rely on their goodwill more than they do on mine. Your parsley’s doing very well. It won’t grow for us. Did you start this from seed?”
“No. It’s a root we got from the health-food shop in Baker Street.”
She picked a small bunch for him, glad to give an exchange for the violet. That way they needn’t feel under an obligation to him. He took the parsley, and washing his handkerchief under the hot tap of the kitchen sink, rinsed it with cold water and folded the leaves carefully inside it. His hands were large, snub-fingered. He used them, gently, unfussily. When he bent over the sink his sweatshirt rode up to reveal a few inches of smooth flesh, brown and speckled as an egg. She felt a sudden desire to touch it, and found herself wondering what he would be like in bed. Gabriel had made love as if he were a ballet dancer, narcissistically preoccupied with his body, every movement an exercise in control. He performed as if thinking, “This is a necessary, unaesthetic business; but see how I contrive to give it grace.” She thought that this man would be different, gentle but direct, free of pretence, free of guilt. After he had wrapped the parsley, he said: “Mara will be glad of that. Thanks.”
She supposed that Mara was his wife or girlfriend. She knew that if she had asked he would have told her; but he never volunteered information. He seemed to view himself and his world with common-sense detachment, accepting ki
ndness at its face value, as if kindness was a common currency of life, answering questions simply, as if unaware of the devious motives from which they sprang. Perhaps in his job it was necessary for survival to take people at their face value too. He hadn’t reacted to her obvious antagonism, yet he didn’t give her the impression that he was exercising any particular control. She thought that his attitude could be summed up: “We’re all of the same blood, and we’re in the same shipwreck. Recriminations, explanations, panic are all a waste of time. Safety requires only that we act towards each other with love.”
She was glad when, at the end of the visit, he said to her mother: “In about a month’s time then. Perhaps you’d rather drop in at the office. I’m out visiting or in court most days, but you’ll find me there Tuesdays and Fridays, nine to twelve-thirty.”
She was glad that he wasn’t coming back, that the flat would once again be their own. Apart from George, when he had helped her lug up some furniture, and Joyce Bungeld’s brief visit, he was the only other person who had set foot in it. She felt, too, that she wasn’t ready yet to cope with someone who might—intriguing and unsettling thought—be naturally good.
12
In the evenings at weekends, or on Mondays when they didn’t work, they often watched television together, carrying the two basket chairs from their bedrooms into the kitchen. Watching television was something of a novelty for Philippa. Working for her O- and A-levels and the Cambridge scholarship had taken most of her time, and the television at Caldecote Terrace was seldom switched on. Maurice, like a number of pundits who never refused an invitation to appear, affected to despise all but a few minority-taste programmes. Now she and her mother became mildly addicted to the risible awfulness of a family drama series in which the characters, apparently physically and mentally unscathed by the traumas of the last episode, were resurrected weekly, freshly coiffured, their wounds healed and scarless, for yet another emotional and physical bloodbath. Such a convenient ability to live for the moment with its subliminal message that the past could literally be put behind one had much to recommend it. There ought, she thought, to be a word coined to describe the frank enjoyment to be had from the reassuring second-rate. And that was how, switching the set on too early, they caught the last ten minutes of Maurice’s encounter with the Bishop.
